概要

People differ considerably from each other in their habitual patterns of thought, feeling and action. Not surprisingly, these differences are reflected not only in what people think, feel, and do, but also in what they say about what they think, feel, or do. Recent studies have identified systematic associations between personality and language use in a variety of different contexts Second, practical constraints limit the size and scope of most writing or speech samples. Virtually all studies to date have relied on writing or speech samples that include no more than a few thousand words per participant. As discussed below, such writing samples limit the types of analyses researchers can conduct, as it is generally not possible to reliably estimate usage rates for individual words, but only for aggregate categories. Moreover, data are typically gathered from participants on a small number of occasions (often just one) spanning several hours or days; such datasets cannot be used to establish whether any identified associations between personality and language remain stable over much longer periods of time (i.e., months or years), or reflect transient influences (e.g., mood).
Finally, most previous studies have modeled the relation between personality and language at a relatively broad level. With few exceptions , studies have focused on broad personality domains such as the Big Five, and have not explored relations with narrower personality dimensions. Similarly, nearly all studies have related differences in personality to predefined semantic categories containing dozens or hundreds of words rather than to individual words. Although the categorical approach has taught us a great deal about the relation between personality and language, it necessarily sacrifices specificity, because statistically reliable correlations between personality traits and individual words may be “washed out” when those words are averaged or summed together with many other words. Moreover, c